With Yahoo sunsetting Delicious among a few other web properties, I think we are seeing how a company fails to capture the potential of an acquisition. Â Delicious was acquired by Yahoo in December 2005, and was an early example of how Social was going to be such an important component to Web 2.0.
The social bookmarking website was an important tool in my life when I launched Open AIM in 2006. Â The team used Delicious’ tagging to view common blog posts or reviews of AIM to determine what we should do with the product and platform. Â Unfortunately Yahoo could not figure out how to take the utility that was Delicious and make it a product that powered other Yahoo properties. Â The truth is Google Reader was able to replicate Delicious’ social features and productize them faster.
I definitely need to make sure to grab my data from Delicious before they shut it down. Â It is weird to see more and more nacent Web 2.0 products get shut down.